Queen Mother to be remembered with Mall monument

Gordon Brown sounded almost sentimental yesterday when he announced a memorial to the Queen Mother would be erected in central London.

Shrugging off his last foray into royal projects - the chancellor chaired the committee that eventually produced the Diana memorial fountain, London's most upmarket swamp - Mr Brown announced the new memorial would be built in The Mall.

"It is right to honour the life and service of the Queen Mother," Mr Brown said yesterday. Like any canny chancellor, he has already secured the funds to pay for it. Mr Brown has the Queen's approval to use the proceeds from a coin minted to celebrate her 80th birthday to pay for the monument.

But the details of what will be built appeared sketchy yesterday. "There will be a memorial," said a spokesman for the department of culture, media and sport. "But the only details were in the chancellor's speech. Its position and so forth will be worked out."

A spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace welcomed the memorial to the Queen Mother as "a lasting re minder of her life and her service of nearly 80 years to the country."

The Mall, which runs from Admiralty Arch to Buckingham Palace, is already home to some imposing monuments.

The biggest is the Victoria Memorial, a 2,300-tonne marble structure that sits in front of Buckingham Palace.

Commissioned by Edward VII in 1901 as a tribute to his mother, Queen Victoria, it cost £325,000 and took five years to construct.

Other monuments in The Mall include a bronze statue of the explorer Cap tain Cook and memorials to Royal Marines killed in South Africa and China in 1899-1900 and members of the Royal Artillery killed in the Boer war.

Despite the enthusiasm for the memorial to the Queen Mother, the erection of monuments in London can be a fraught process.

When a 15ft marble statue of a pregnant, disabled woman was placed on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square last year, it caused a great deal of controversy. Marc Quinn's sculpture was chosen by the mayor of London's commissioning group from a shortlist of six, but was described as "patronising" by one newspaper columnist.

The new memorial's designer will have to hope it has fewer teething troubles than the memorial to Princess Diana that opened in Hyde Park in July last year. Designed by the American landscape architect, Kathryn Gustafson, the £3.6m stone oval was shut twice last year after three people slipped and injured themselves and the grass surrounding it flooded.

The chancellor must be hoping that second time round his efforts to remember a much-loved royal turn out to be something more than a damp squib.